Communications & Meetings

Adobe Connect

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Adobe Connect is a web conferencing platform for web meetings, eLearning, and webinars. With Adobe Connect for Web Meetings, you can: engage in complete mobile-to-mobile collaboration, with the ability to host, present, and collaborate anytime, anywhere on virtually any device; help ensure easy meeting access for all participants with no desktop client downloads; create your own personal digital office in the cloud with a customized URL that’s always on, and content and layouts that remain in place; [and make] interactive, customizable, and indexed recordings.

GotoMeeting

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GoToMeeting is the extremely simple, extraordinarily powerful way to hold unlimited online meetings with up to 25 attendees. [You can] start a meeting and share your screen with just a click; collaborate face to face with HDFaces video conferencing; [and] save with integrated audio conferencing (via VoIP and telephone). Attendees can join from a Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone or Android device.

Slack

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Team communication for the 21st century. Organize your team conversations in open channels. Make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything—everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on. For sensitive information, create private channels and invite a few team members. Send messages directly to another person or to a small group of people for more focused conversations. Take a conversation from typing to face-to-face by starting a voice or video call in any Channel or Direct Message. Make one-on-one or group calls right from Slack without needing to open another app or share invite links.

WebEx

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WebEx allows you to “meet with colleagues across your organization, or halfway across the planet. Meet online and share files, information, and expertise... You can do almost anything with WebEx that you can do in person, minus the travel time. Use WebEx specialized products to: present dynamic online events and webinars; deliver online training and eLearning experiences; provide outstanding remote technical support; build stronger relationships with in-person telepresence experiences delivered over the cloud; and share knowledge, experience and ideas across your organization.

Comprehensive Collaboration Workspaces

Drupal Commons

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“Drupal Commons is a packaged form of Drupal (a ‘Drupal distribution’) that contains the majority of pre-built features that a social community or external community site might need to create productive interactions among employees, customers—blogs, wikis, calendars, and much more. It provides a robust community site out of the box so that you don’t have to assemble all of the pieces yourself, all you need to do is invite people to participate.”

Huddle

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Huddle lets you “store, share, and work on files with anyone inside and outside your organization—from your desktop, iPad, or smartphone.” It allows you to “share files across the firewall with your colleagues and partners… comment, assign and assign tasks and approvals—all in one central location—to get work done efficiently and effectively)… and [to create] user profiles [that] allow you to connect with the specific people you need to contribute to your project.”

KARL

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“KARL is an open source web system for collaboration, organizational intranets, and knowledge management. KARL is simple to use and enables small and large groups to create communities and to share information… Top features include: topic-based communities, powerful search, secured external collaboration, rich text wiki, collaborative blog, layered group calendar, strong email integration, and outstanding security.”

Socialtext

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“By simplifying people’s ability to share knowledge, ideas and corporate data, Socialtext removes silos and corporate barriers that have traditionally hampered companies’ ability to respond to change and better serve customers. Socialtext’s enterprise social networking products — including microblogging, blogs, wikis, profiles, and social spreadsheets — provide simpler ways for employees to share vital information and work together in real-time. Delivered in a variety of hosted cloud services, as well as on-site appliances, enterprise customers are provided with flexible deployment options that meet their security requirements.”

Wiggio

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“Wiggio.com is a free, online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups. Over 100,000 groups are using Wiggio to: host virtual meetings and conference calls; manage events with a shared calendar; create to do lists and assign tasks; poll your group in real time; send email, text and voice messages; and upload and manage files in a shared folder.”

Conference Management

These tools help people track conferences happening in their field and also organize and manage conferences.

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Lanyrd

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“With a host of events around the world, Lanyrd allows you to add events, discover new and exciting conferences, and track your friends to see what events they are attending.” Lanyrd helps you you to: “find fascinating events [by seeing] where your friends are speaking or going, find[ing] conferences near you, or brows[ing] conferences by topic... enjoy a better event [by tracking] what’s going on during the conference, even if you’re not there. [by sharing] who’s tweeting what and what links are hot… and catch up afterwards [by viewing] slides, video, and podcasts from conferences you attended or tracked.”

Data Aggregation, Sharing, & Standards

These tools help people compile, standardize, and share information.

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Fluxx

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Fluxx is “a collaborative work platform, connecting everyone in your organization to the data that runs your business.” Fluxx provides “unified software systems… [where] segregated data streams are brought together, fostering entirely new interactions and revolutionary insights; a usable user interface [that] allows everyone in your organization to interact with data via custom dashboard views; and a social work platform [that] bridges organizational gaps with practical social features that foster more efficient workflow and catalyze collaboration.” Fluxx has been used in philanthropic settings to help streamline grants management processes.

Foundation Directory Online

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“Foundation Directory Online (FDO) is the nation’s leading online funding research tool, developed by the Foundation Center. FDO provides the most current, accurate, and comprehensive information available on U.S. grantmakers and their grants, drawn from reliable sources, including IRS Form 990s, grantmaker web sites and annual reports, and the grantmakers themselves. The Foundation Center has combined its data with the latest technology. These advances have led to improvements such as the ability to keyword-search across an entire database of IRS Form 990s, map and chart the distribution of a funder’s grants, and sign up to receive funder-specific e-mail alerts.”

IssueLab

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“Through IssueLab, the Foundation Center is working to more effectively gather, index, and share the collective intelligence of the social sector. IssueLab provides free access to thousands of case studies, evaluations, white papers, and issue briefs addressing some of the world’s most pressing social problems. If you have worked, volunteered, or interned for a social sector organization, foundation, or university based research center, you can create an account and add resources to the IssueLab collection. As long as your materials are free and available to the public, IssueLab accepts annual reports, case studies, datasets, evaluations, fact sheets, issue/policy briefs, literature/research reviews, presentations, reports/white papers, surveys, congressional testimony, and toolkits.”

Data Analysis & Visualization

These tools help groups develop a shared understanding of the patterns within their data.

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Gapminder World

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“Gapminder World shows the world’s most important trends. Gapminder is a non-profit venture—a modern “museum” on the Internet—promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.” Gapminder is based on the “Trendalyzer software, [which] sought to unveil the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics. The current version of Trendalyzer has been available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying time series of development statistics for all countries.”

Data Gathering

These tools make it easy to collect data, solicit feedback, or ask a question to a large group of people.

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Plaxo

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“Your address book is full of people who won’t stay still. New jobs, new homes, and new social networks make it difficult to keep track of it all. Plaxo pulls it together automatically so your address book is always up-to-date, accurate, and ready to go when and where you need it.”

Quora

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“Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge. Quora is your best source of knowledge. Ask any question, get real answers from people with first hand experience, and blog about what you know.”

Data Organizing

These tools allow people to curate and share with others their reading lists, bookmarked webpages, mind maps, and other schemes for organizing information.

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Delicious

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“Delicious is an easy, free tool to save, organize, and remember the links you find interesting on the web. It’s a great place to develop a rich network of people who share your interests.” With Delicious, you can: “add links to Delicious and never lose what you find and share on the web; organize your collection of links and share it with like-minded people; and browse links curated by the Delicious community to discover content you care about.”

Evernote

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“Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet, and the web. With Evernote, all of your notes, web clips, files and images are made available on every device and computer you use: save everything cool and exciting you see online and in the real world; save entire webpages to your Evernote account with the nifty web clipper browser extensions; search by keyword, tag, and even find text inside images; and share your notes and collaborate on projects with friends and colleagues.”

File Sharing & Collaborative Writing

These tools make it easy for many people to share and edit documents.

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Dropbox

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“Dropbox lets you bring all your photos, docs and videos anywhere. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website. Dropbox works hard to make sure that all your files are the same no matter where you’re working from. You can start working on a computer at school or the office, and finish from your home computer. Never email yourself a file again! Dropbox also makes it easy to share with others. Invite your friends, family, and teammates to any folder in your Dropbox, and it’ll be as if you saved that folder straight to their computers.”

Google Drive

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“Google Drive lets you store and access your files anywhere—on the web, on your hard drive, or on the go. Here’s how it works: go to Google Drive on the web at drive.google.com; install Google Drive on your computer or mobile device; throw your files in Google Drive, and it’s right there on your device. Now your files go everywhere you do. [If you] change a file on the web, on your computer, or on your mobile device, it updates on every device where you’ve installed Google Drive.”

Fundraising & Matching

These tools help funders to connect with specific projects or organizations in need of funding.

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One Spark

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One Spark is an annual crowdfunding festival connecting people with great ideas to the resources they need to make them a reality. One Spark also hosts a speaker summit which brings together some of the most accomplished founders, creatives, makers, and doers from around the country to share their stories.

Innovation Management

These tools support group brainstorming and innovation.

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Learning Registry

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“The Learning Registry is a new approach to capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of digital content to benefit educators and learners. The Learning Registry is not a website or repository… it's not a search engine… and it's not a replacement for the excellent sources of online learning content that already exist… The Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.”

Joint Decision Making

These tools allow many people to easily weigh in on group decisions.

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Codigital

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Codigital is a cloud-based technology for getting fast, co-created input on business critical issues. Codigital enables groups, from a few people to thousands, to co-create ideas, solutions and policies and engage more people in conferences, brainstorming, and requirements gathering.

Testimonial:

"My experience has been that this tool has made the critical difference for establishing a new national working group focused on setting a child health services research and policy agenda. The tool and codigital's insight into people and group functioning enable me to navigate through the political minefields and sink right into the shared vision, goals, and priorities. Each have a voice, it is anonymous and at the same time taps into a fun sense of healthy competition. I am planning on using this tool and working to optimize its capacity through all of my work."

Mural.ly

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Mural.ly helps teams speed up the creative process and generate, prioritize and organize new ideas. It's an interactive and flexible tool - you can use sticky notes to jot down ideas, use images, links, and videos to show your ideas, and sort your ideas spatially. Your team can collaborate in real time and track changes to see how ideas evolve.

News Aggregation

These tools help individuals and groups to monitor the news and to focus on topics of greatest interest to them.

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Digg

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“Digg delivers the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now. The Internet is full of great stories, and Digg helps you find, read, and share the very best ones. It’s simple and it’s everywhere: visit Digg on the web, find it on your iPhone, or get the best of Digg delivered to your inbox with The Daily Digg.”

Flipboard

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Flipboard's mission is to let people discover and share content in beautiful, simple, and meaningful ways. Search for anything—people, topics, hashtags, your favorite sites—and then flip through articles, updates, photos and videos all in a beautiful magazine-style format. Flipboard allows you to curate a custom dashboard of content from across the Web, from your RSS feeds to the New York Times, and is available for iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, Kindle Fire & NOOK.

News.me

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“We're fascinated by how people find, read, and talk about the news. We design social applications from the ground up with news in mind. The web is full of noise and is fundamentally conversational — we build the tools to help find meaning and engage in that conversation.”

Philanthropy News Digest

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“Philanthropy News Digest (PND), a daily news service of the Foundation Center, is a compendium, in digest form, of philanthropy-related articles and features culled from print and electronic media outlets nationwide. Published daily, each PND abstract summarizes the content of, or from, an original article, press or news release, or grantmaker web site. Each abstract includes a citation of the original news source, which readers of the Digest can use to read the original web site, or to find a copy of the original article through a library or a document delivery service. Sign up for the Philanthropy News Digest newsletter, published on Tuesdays, to get a full week’s news in one place.”

Social Networking & Online Community

These tools connect people to others with whom they have something in common.

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Facebook

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“Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” Facebook is an online social networking platform, with features that include: user profiles; ‘friending”; news feeds with updates about friends and events; timeline (your collection of photos, stories, and experiences that tell your story); groups; messaging; chat; video calling; and sharing of likes, interests, and events.

Google +

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“Google+ is an online community platform that allows you to connect and share with others.” Features include: user profiles; “circles” that allow users to organize people into groups for sharing; public communities around shared interests and private communities with selected people; photo sharing; “hangouts” that enable users to video chat for free with up to nine friends at the same time; and a mobile app that allows users to stay connected while they’re on the go.

LinkedIn

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LinkedIn is “the world's largest professional network with 225 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the globe.” The website can help you: “establish your professional profile; build and maintain a broader network of professionals you can trust; find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates; learn about other companies; leverage powerful tools to find and reach the people you need; tap into the knowledge of your network; and discover new opportunities."

Yammer

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“Yammer brings the power of social networking to your company. Yammer is as easy to use as great consumer software like Facebook and Twitter, but is designed for company collaboration, file sharing, knowledge exchange, and team efficiency.” With Yammer you can: “create, discuss, and share content with coworkers without sending a single email; store large files, post documents to team workspaces, and collaboratively edit pages in real time; find the content, conversations, people and business data you need, when you need them; search instantly across your entire company and all your other business applications; and connect and collaborate with external customers, vendors and business partners.”